Here is a quote from Ludwig Van Beethoven as interpreted into English by Corinne Heline in her book ‘Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies – Correlated with the Nine Spiritual Mysteries’.

“I have no friend. I must live alone; but I know that in my heart God is nearer to me than in others. I approach him without fear, I have always known him. Neither am I anxious of my music, which no adverse fate can overtake, and which will free him who understands it from the misery which afflicts others.”

My interpretation from English into my own inner language is that Beethoven was willing to access the terrifying wonders of the universe and bring them to any earthbound person willing to listen and be healed. Very Christlike of him.

So what is required of any of us to attain these heights and spread the love? Do we need to be musical geniuses or we can we just keep it simple and true?

I’m willing to see what happens with anyone who’s willing to try.

You might know that performing has always been my greatest teacher. Performing is kind of like looking at yourself inside a jeweler’s loupe, the audience being the loupe.  Last January 15, three of us comMUSIKats went up to Flagstaff to present our idea for a workshop called “Everybody’s a Performer” where I had the chance to see details of myself I never knew existed.

And the funny thing is that THAT was the point of our presentation, learning about ourselves through performance. I learned that I don’t follow a script too well, particularly if it needs to finish as I watch the timer count down from 6 minutes to zero. I learned that I am truly an improvisor who needs to connect with the audience. The three of us learned of many nuts and bolts that could have made the presentation get across our idea in a very compelling way. But the main thing I learned for myself is that it’s OK to bomb. In fact it might be the best way to learn.

Here is the script that we crafted, which had I delivered as well as I pictured, would have, I believe, garnered ourselves a healthy grant.

(call and response) comMUSIKey… Music is the Key… To community

Hi I’m Jonathan Best, although when I first went to Kenya to work with the Maasai communities I discovered that they didn’t have a word for best in their language so they changed my last name to Sidai Pii which means Completely Good. And because I see music in everybody, maybe we should all change our last names to Osingolio Pii which means Completely Musical.

That would be a dream come true because the mission of comMUSIKey is to build community through all inclusive music making. And that begs the question, what is the community we want to build. I want an all inclusive community where every culture and every person has a voice. where we all listen to each other across whatever divide we have in our minds.

I consider listening to be the most important skill in building community AND making music.

What if, by fostering life skills within a musical group we are actually building community? What if all the skills we develop in our life contribute to our musicality and vice versa? And finally, were we all born musical? When you walk you got rhythm, when you talk you got singin’. Try extending some of your words the next time you talk. (singing)You’ll hear yourself singing. Close your eyes and imagine that your entire body is made of musical vibrations. If it was quiet enough in this room you could hear your blood pumping through your arteries in rhythm.

Our vision for this project is to invite as many people as we can from as many divergent populations as we can into a special room where there is no judgment. No auditions. Everyone is welcome. We want all cultures, including all musical cultures. We want classical music lovers playing with beatboxers. And we will collaborate using techniques in singing, songwriting, improvisation, and everything musical. We will then break into smaller groups to workshop these techniques over an 8 week period culminating in a performance to the general public. We will videotape select pieces of the workshop and make a video to promote comMUSIKey, gain funding for future projects, but most of all, inspire the entire world to make all inclusive music.

On my first trip to Maasailand, I was greeted by an entire village in what may be the most memorable performance of my life. They paraded around us with dance and song until we were completely enveloped in polyrhythmic harmonies coming from every angle. And not a single one of them was a professional musician. They were just singing their lives. And then they invited us to join in. And we sang into the night. That’s what I want to do in this country.

On my return from that trip I went straight into a four year program called Music for People where I learned how to facilitate music with diverse groups of people. What I discovered is that we in the US have just as much music inside us as the Maasai. It just needs to be encouraged. And this is what our project is all about.

I want to thank the Arizona Commission on the Arts for planting the seed of thinking outrageously. It enabled us to think beyond our normal boundaries to what we really believe in. This is what art is all about. It creates quantum leaps to places we’ve never been before.

We will do this project no matter what funding we get. And then we will broadcast it to the world. And we will keep broadcasting until everybody is making music at every gathering, whether it be in the kitchen or at a barn raising.

So I invite you in creating a 79 note chord in celebration of inclusive art in all its forms. Open your mouth and let the air fill your body, and on my cue let out whatever ooh sound your body wants to make. Take a breath whenever you want and let your sound evolve as you look around and listen. Every one of your voices is creating community. Now let that sound be outrageous, move your body and now we have to STOP(cue). Thank you for that little taste of community music and for listening.

Here is an example of nature creating a groove. These are two different raindrop streams falling from a gutter, one playing three beats against the other’s four. They are slightly different tempos so they go in and out of phase with other, similar to Steve Reich’s Phasing Music.  They cycle back and forth between a strong three against four – which is often found in West African rhythms – to where they are almost, but not completely in lockstep. This creates an effect that drummers call flamming.

There’s a Christmas song that has this rhythm. What’s it called?

Is this music?  It is to me.  Music is in the listening I think.

Who’s musical? Hint: Everyone

Go outside a listen to the musical terrain.  Start walking and listen to it change as you take part in its rhythm.  This is collaboration at its finest. The  terrain is vast. It extends as far as the ear can hear. Listen to the distant reaches. Maybe there’s a chain saw barely audible in the mountains trading riffs with a cocker spaniel in the 2^nd floor apartment to your left. Keep walking as you start to feel one with the music. Listen to the voices in your head. Maybe they are scolding voices or voices full of praise. They are part of the terrain. Usually they are from far off in the distant past.

What if the universe is composed of music? (pun intended) What if by simply listening we are taking part in the universal symphony?  What if through practicing we are not getting better, just going deeper?

Listen then sing, listen then sing. Listen to how you blend and become one with the universal music.

Maybe making music is taking part in our musical terrain.

In my studies at MUSIC FOR PEOPLE I learned that there are no wrong notes.  My favorite Thelonius Monk quote is “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”  Well I’m here to tell you that the piano ain’t got any notes at all.  Read on.

I’m always on the lookout for things that get in the way of us all being our complete musical selves.  I feel that if we identify these blocks we can learn to step around them or dance around them.  And we can sing while we dance.

I think that one of the global blocks is notation.  It affects everyone even if you don’t read or try to read music.  The reason for this is that it affects the way our culture perceives music.  We think of music as more complex than it is.  It can be complex if we want it to be but so can conversation but that doesn’t stop most of us from speaking.

Music notation and music complexity evolved together.  The first notes were simply reminders which is why they were called notes.  Notes took many forms over the centuries from places like Mesopotamia to ancient Greece but the trajectory that led to modern western notation started in the middle of the 9th century.  People would write diagonal lines called neumes above the words of poems to indicate whether the melody went up or down.

It took another fifty years to place the neumes at varying heights above the words to suggest the shape of the melody.  Then they started drawing horizontal lines to really zero in on the pitch.  They started with a red line then added a yellow line and by the 11th century they had four lines.

The 5th line took another two hundred years.  Rhythm was another matter.  The notation of rhythm started with rhythmic modes.  There were six of them in the eleventh century and they were based on the cadences of poetic verse that people of that time were already familiar with.  I am not familiar with those verses so I don’t even try to comprehend.

In the next century they started to dissect the rhythms into discreet parts using different note heads with names like long, double long, breve (for brief I’m guessing), and semibreve which would be subdivided into twos and threes as the imperfect and the imperfect respectively.  These would all be interpreted based on their relationships to each other, again way too complicated for me.  Time signatures and bar lines weren’t invented until well into the fourteenth century.

Why was it so difficult to nail this stuff down?  They’d been doing it with words for hundreds of years.

My theory is that in the beginning individual notes didn’t exist as separate from the words and melody and all the indescribable nuances of the song.  The concept of individual notes had to be created right along with the notation that was being invented. To parcel everything out was a technological feat on par with extracting iron from ore.  The music they had could not be written down so they had to create music that could.

There was a time when you could sing a song to someone and they could sing it to someone else and other people could join in just like in any conversation.  And when the singing stopped the song would only exist in memory ready to be sung again as a different piece of music whenever it was desired.

I believe that speaking and music developed concurrently in our evolution.  To me they are inseparable.  When words are spoken it’s pretty darn difficult to keep the music out of them.  Words and music are quite the package.  Words convey thoughts and music conveys everything else.  That’s why jingles are so effective. Like salt and water, once you combine them it’s very difficult to separate them.  The truth of the music becomes part of the words to the point where people believe that the words are true.  Maybe Gregorian Chants were some kind of early form of jingle.

Like I said at the beginning, this block called notation effects us all.  Whether we can effortlessly read whatever “music” is put in front of us or if we have managed to keep written music out of our lives completely it’s hard to escape from the paradigm that music can be broken down into individual parts and that it doesn’t simply flow through us a like a river.

You can put your bucket in the river and attempt to distill it down to its essentials or you can jump in and swim.  And the next time you tackle a “piece” of Mozart remember to make it your own.  Mozart has long ago let it go so you are free to do with it what you will.  And the next time you have a musical inspiration and you want to write it down remember that the notes you write are just notes to remind you of where to look knowing that when you find it the music will be completely different from what it was.

Music is who we are.  Let us be who we are.  Let us not be notes.

Moving in time to a steady beat is closely linked to better language skills, a study suggests.

Only one person showed up to my playshop today.  So we had a chance to focus in.  We started with what Music for People calls “One Quality Sound” where everybody just sings whatever note happens to come out of their mouth and we listen to the quality of that spontaneous chord.  In our case it was just a two note chord and of course it was beautiful so we did it again with different notes and it was even better because whatever happens in the moment is the best there is.  Then we picked out a couple of nice Djembes and got into some very flexible grooves that were able to meander freely because we were listening so intently to each other.  We added conversational singing which is just like talking but the attention is on melody.  She would sing a phrase then I would respond and we’d go back and forth until we found ourselves weaving our melodies together much like people do when they’re talking about something very exciting.  They’ll talk over each other but not in an interrupting kind of way but more like a duet.  Then we did some mirroring whereby one of us would sing slow enough that the other could follow all the nuances of pitch, timber, and volume exactly.

Basically what we were doing was honing our listening with each exercise.  And now we were ready to just play some duets with whatever instruments struck our fancy.  She played an mbera and I played ukulele.  We both sang.  And then we looked at each other when we both felt it was time to end and we made the ending extra special.  We did it again with me on guitar and lo and behold it was even better of course.  To me it was just as beautiful as anything I have ever heard even from my musical heros.

Then we talked about what makes great music.  We decided that it’s all about intention.  If you intend to go deep with each note and not spiral with judgment after it is played how can it not be beautiful?  She said that sounds like a spiritual practice.  I had to agree.